Friday, February 12, 2010

Reflections in a Melting Icicle

As nearly everyone knows, the east coast has been slammed recently with multiple snow storms, the one on Wednesday hit us hard on the east end of Long Island, making the world white and wonderful. (At least that's my opinion, one not shared by many of my friends.)

Yesterday, Peter and I rose at dawn to go out and photograph the results of the blizzard that only stopped at around 2:00 a.m. We got a number of good photos of our village, the beach and the farm fields, but the best were shot in our very own back yard.

Some of you know that we have a circular stair case in the back yard that reaches the balcony off our bedroom. Well it was covered in icicles yesterday, which began to melt as the day progressed. They shone so brightly in the sun and yet also reflected the bright blue sky. So we began to shoot the icicles, trying ever so hard to capture one after it had released a droplet of water in the melting process. The effort resulted in nearly 1,000 photos (the joy of digital photography!), only a few of which captured the droplet falling ground-ward.

When we began scrutinizing the icicle photos for clarity by zooming in to the extreme, we were thrilled with what we saw! We'd captured a reflection of everything you can see from our backyard, including our hot tub, the hedge, our neighbor's Japanese maple and their roof line! To make it conceptually easier to understand in the attached photos, I've taken the liberty of rotating the last two images 180 degrees. We hope you enjoy these even a fraction as much as we have!

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Vickie, I have to tell you that I took nearly 1000 shots that day trying to catch a droplet that had been newly released from an icicle. I probably got 5-10 shots of a droplet in that state of suspended animation but this was by far the best. I had no idea that we'd get the reflection, that was just the happy surprise when we zoomed in!

If you're interested in the shooting details here they are:
Shot with a Nikon D60 with a AF-S Nikkor 55-200mm 1:4-5.6 telephoto lense set at 200mm. We use a Sport setting on the camera a lot for stopping surfers and kite surfers "in their tracks" so to speak and used it successfully here too. That setting resulted in a shutter speed of 1/1000 @ f 5.6 and an ISO of 180. No flash and no tripod.

I am not sure that there are enough adjectives to describe these wonderful, fabulous and unusual photos. Yes, in clicking on the droplet, one can see the reflection of your neighbors house. Amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!